Category: Google App Engine

As you all might have noticed that I was not posting for a while now, actually had been taken overy by few projects. But today I thought to post about the updates from Google App Engine. Google App Engine have released the Cookbook where you can submit your recipies or can benefit from other people’s snippets of code.

One more thing that Google App Engine team has done which is really useful, they have included the documentation with SDK, so if you are offline you will still have access to SDK. This will not let your engine stops even if you are not connected to internet.

If you haven’t been following Google App Engine Blog, according to latest post the Google App Engine is getting popularity and many programmers are learning python just to play with App Engine. According to Marzia Niccolai on Google App Engine Blog:

So, if you want to host your application on reliable Google platform then you gotta learn Python to make your next app in Google App Engine. Google App Engine is going to be the next big thing if they started supporting rest of the languages like PHP, Ruby and Perl which they have already promised. So stay tuned.

Google I/O the developer event that happened in SanFransisco, many were able to join it but there are thousands of people who were not able to join it Google has not forgotten them. The videos of almost all the talks has been posted but the best one is “Rapid Development wiht Python, Django and Google App Engine“.

Its a must watch video so I decided to share it here. I hope you will benefit from it. You can get the presentation slides from here.

If you like the above video then there are few other good videos too related to Google App Engine, so if you ware interested in learning Google App Engine and not only that but there are videos for other Google technologies which include Gears, Gadgets, OpenSocial and gData. Have look at Google I/O session videos posted with slides

Wow! Great news for python developer out there, Google has open the signup for their App Engine. Now every one can signup for the App Engine account. If you haven’t got your account yet and want to be on the bleeding edge of web development, then go and signup for App Engine and have some fun with App Engine SDK then you can upload you app.

Google App Engine has also introduced to new API which includes Image manipulation and our all time favourite memcache API. So, its time to put the fun back into web development and lets develop some useful apps based on App Engine.

If you are Django Developer then you can put your Django Apps on Google App Engine too. Happy developing.

Note: If you are not a developer and want to see something developed on App Engine, then leave a comment and may be some of us will do it for fun.

Guido Van Rossum, who has been working with team working on Google App Engine, has released the open source version of Mondrian. Mondrian is the code review tool heavily used at Google by Google Engineers, Mondrian was developed by Guido as his first project at Google. Guido said:

My first project as a Google engineer was an internal web app for code review. According to Wikipedia, code review is “systematic examination (often as peer review) of computer source code intended to find and fix mistakes overlooked in the initial development phase, improving both the overall quality of software and the developers’ skills.” Not an exciting topic, perhaps, but the internal web app, which I code-named Mondrian after one of my favorite Dutch painters, was an overnight success among Google engineers (who evidently value software quality and skills development :-). I even gave a public presentation about it: you can watch the video on YouTube.

Guido always wanted to release Mondrian as open source, but due to its popularity amongst Google Engineers he couldn’t released it as Mondrian is heavily tied to Google internal development tools. According to Guido:

I’ve always hoped that we could release Mondrian as open source, but so far it hasn’t happened: due to its popularity inside Google, it became more and more tied to proprietary Google infrastructure like Bigtable, and it remained limited to Perforce, the commercial revision control system most used at Google.

But After joining Google App Engine Team Guido got a chance to write the clone of Mondrian which he named Rietveld and released as OpenSource. Rietveld is available at: codereview.appspot.com

According to Guido:

The Rietveld app serves several purposes at once: it is a demo of fairly large-scale use of the popular web framework Django with App Engine.

Oh yes! Finally. Google has releast a Django helper for their Google Apps Engine. The helper gives you the blank project the same that would be provided by django-admin’s startproject command. From the README file:

The helper is provided in the context of a blank Django project, very similar to what would be provided by the django-admin.py startproject command. This project contains minor customisations to manage.py and settings.py that demonstrate how to integrate the helper with a Django project.

Helper helps you use your Django framework almost natively and build your Django apps that would be runnable on Google App Engine. The Django helper provides following functionality:

The ability to use most manage.py commands

A BaseModel class that appears the same as the standard Django Model class.

The ability to serialize and deserialize model instances to JSON, YAML and XML.

Access to Django’s test framework with a test datastore and support for fixtures.

The steps Google has taken will really help Django Community to get their hands dirty with Google Apps Engine. As now they have BaseModel class that is same as Model class provided by the Django framework. The people who have used Django would agree with me that Django DB Models are very easier to manage and use then any other frameworks (I have used CakePHP, Django and Google Apps Engine). But I am fan of Django DB Models as they provide the Pythonic interface to your Database.

As summer is near and I am committed with my self to get my hands dirty on Ruby this summer and Google App Engine Team is working hard to add other languages support like PHP, Ruby & perl. So hopefully by this summer they will be able to add Ruby until then I would be familiar with Ruby on Rails framework, then I might be in better position to decide which framework gives your the easiest DB API and DB Models.